Part 1 of the “Beyond 800 words” series, published back in September 2017, opens with the following:

The 800-word article is still the dominant form of online news from most publishers. This largely seems to be a legacy from printed newspapers and to a lesser extent this is true for online news video online too, with much of it still produced in traditional made-for-TV formats albeit shorter.

And in Part 1 Ferne identifies and briefly discusses a number of new formats like listicles, live blogs, and structured news.

Part 2, published last week, covers recent research work at the BBC around how Gen Z (18-26 year olds) wants to consume the news. The article discusses some of their methodology and research findings, and it presents examples of prototype news formats and interaction models that appealed to Gen Z audiences.

The thing about those formats – which include scrollable video, swipe to view reactions/polls, a section-by-section “choose your own format” model, and others – is that they are really nice, but also incredibly resource-intensive to produce at scale. For that modular format one, imagine having to:

Write a long version of the article

Write a short version of the article

Break each version into modular sections

Produce video for each section

Edit, view, and test the multiple formats to ensure they form a cohesive narrative

Ship the damned thing

That’s difficult for a small or medium-sized newsroom to do more than once a month. A dedicated team – bare minimum: a researcher, a writer, a video and sound editor, and an editor/production lead – could probably push something out once a week.

It’s all to say that if there’s a format race, it’s likely to be between bigger, well-resourced newsrooms. There’s definitely room for small newsrooms which are built around a novel format. Ferne references Circa as an example. But that’s a high stakes bet, because you’re wagering on both your ability to find and report on important and interesting stories and, moreover, that the fancy new format stays relevant among a fickle and increasingly fast-moving audience.

That’s going to be a tall order.

You can subscribe to my newsletter, the Rowley Report, at Rowley.Report.

There have been many programs that build upon Markdown’s principle of readability in pure-text formatting, and I wanted to share a couple of them here.

Since issue #2 of my newsletter, I’ve written almost everything in Markdown, the text-to-HTML conversion software originally written by John Gruber, the Daring Fireball himself.

It’s shockingly easy to use when you get the hang of its syntax. Fortunately, there are a number of “cheat sheets” available to help you get started if you’re not familiar with it. I personally prefer writing in Markdown (specifically MultiMarkdown) on a plaintext editor to writing in a WYSIWYG environment these days because it’s a little closer to the metal and gives me a lot of options for how I want to share my work.

Since the original release of Markdown, a lot of developers have built Markdown editors into their software to excellent effect. Since Markdown was originally built by and for writers, it’s no surprise that it’s used as the markup language of choice for Github pages, blog posts on Ghost and other blogging platforms, and other places where text is written and published on the web.

What I find most interesting about Markdown is the design philosophy. First and foremost, as Gruber says in the original spec:

“The overriding design goal for Markdown’s formatting syntax is to make it as readable as possible. The idea is that a Markdown-formatted document should be publishable as-is, as plain text, without looking like it’s been marked up with tags or formatting instructions.”

There have been many other programs that build upon Markdown’s principle of readability in pure-text formatting, and I wanted to share a couple of them here.

Dillinger.io

Dillinger.io is a simple, web-based Markdown editor with a pane that renders your Markdown as formatted HTML in really-close-to-real-time. It’s a great site for playing around with Markdown for the first time.

(It’s kind of like Codepen for text.)

iA Writer

iA Writer, is a minimalist and un-opinionated Markdown editor for MacOS and iOS, and it’s been my Markdown editor of choice basically since it launched. I first used it on my first generation iPad with that amazing keyboard dock, and continued to use it as iA built the Mac app and built out the feature set.

One of my favorite features of iA Writer is its syntax highlighting. Unlike with a code editor, iA Writer lets users highlights English words based on the part of speech they represent. So, if I’m working on a sentence that’s lexically dense, I’m able to visualize its bits and pieces to ensure that I’m not veering too deeply into run-on territory.

It also features easy integration with Dropbox and iCloud Drive, full-screen editing, metadata support by way of MultiMarkdown, a range of export modes, easy image/file embedding, and custom document templating for PDF exports, a feature near and dear to my heart.

There are other Markdown-driven editors out there, including Ulysses and Scrivener, which are geared toward toward users who want more software-based assistance with project management and organizational structure. I’ve tried Ulysses and quite liked it, but I still prefer iA Writer’s somewhat hands-off approach.

At time of writing, iA Writer is still my tool of choice for writing my weekly-ish newsletter. It’s one of the best pieces of software I use and can’t recommend it highly enough.

Marp

Marp is an open source, cross-platform editor for making presentations using Markdown. It utilizes Github-flavored Markdown’s syntax and a simple text editor with more traditional syntax editing and so-called “directives” for how Marp’s rendering engine treats pagination and aspect ratios. To that end, using Marp, you can set aspect ratios for standard paper sizes in A and B 0-8, as well as other popular aspect ratios.

For now, the software is still in a pre-release beta, and it lacks some of the features of more fully-developed Markdown presentation apps like Deckset or the Remark.js library, but it’ll be interesting to see where the project goes.

Closing thoughts

I am a big, big fan of Markdown, and since it’s become the default plain-text input syntax for extremely popular websites like Github, reddit, Hacker News, StackExchange and others, it seems to have cemented itself as the default standard on the web.

However, like anything that isn’t purely WYSIWYG, Markdown still feels like a thing for programmers, power-users and professionals. This reputation, to me, feels somewhat undeserved because, again, it’s really freaking easy to pick up.

So, if you’ve never tried writing in plain text like this, give a Markdown editor a spin. There are literally hundreds of great options out there.

I forgot where I heard this, but on some or another podcast it was declared that “Microsoft Excel is the gateway drug to programming.” And I’m coming to believe this more and more.

I’m someone with more than a passing interest in programming who simultaneously lacks any serious proficiency with writing code. Irony of ironies, right? Also, I’m now in this weird liminal space between being really good at manipulating data in a spreadsheet-type environment and seeing the possibility of what I can do with a real programming language while still sorely lacking in the practical know-how to get a lot of things done.

And that’s why I’m still tied to using Excel and Google Sheets for a lot of my data analysis work. Both are fine tools, albeit with their own quirks and limitations. Although Excel is good for the kind of work I do, which typically involves big CSVs that Google Sheets kind of chokes on, I strongly prefer Google Sheets for its more expressive functions and easy connectivity to outside data stores, including Google’s own services.

It’s for this reason that I’m going to be covering the subject of creating abstract, auto-generating formulas in Google Sheets only. Also, I’m like 90% sure one can’t use CONCATENATE() in Excel for the use case I’m presenting here, but I’d love to be proven wrong.

The challenge

Part of my job is to analyze venture capital data, and oftentimes the scope of my analysis expands beyond US borders. Accordingly, I often have to deal multiple currencies, which can be a pain.

So imagine a column containing data for an arbitrarily large number of VC deals priced in an arbitrary number of different international currencies. (For the sake of this example, let’s assume these are all fairly recent deals, so historically accurate currency conversion figures aren’t important.)

Remembering that our dataset can be arbitrarily large, what’s the easiest way to convert those foreign currencies into USD so we can make comparisons on equal terms?

An example dataset

Below, to avoid using proprietary data, I fabricated an array of 20 sample deals using a random number generator and multiplying its output by different scalars depending on the round type. The size of deals do not necessarily correspond to any real-world averages and are here for demonstration purposes only.

Also, I picked 20 rows because it’s small enough to fit in a screenshot. For a sample size of 20 rows, it’s still easy to do all the conversions by hand sorting, but the ideal solution would scale to sheets with hundreds or thousands of rows and a huge combination of currency conversions. This is why we’re going to emphasize abstraction here.

Here’s what we’ve got to work with…

(Yes, the numbers are hideous. Deal with it.)

Here, we have sample deals from five different countries: the USA, Canada, the UK, France, and Germany. (I intentionally picked two countries that use the same currency for reasons that will become apparent later)

Converting foreign currencies to USD, some methods of varying efficiency

We have several choices for how we want to make the conversions of foreign currencies to USD. Here, I’ll share three ways, with each successive option being more abstract and scalable than the last.

To remind ourselves of what we want to convert our currencies into here, we’ll add a “Target Currency” column and set all values in that column to USD. And we’ll also add a “Conversion Rate” column where we’ll set our conversion ratio. (This column isn’t absolutely necessary, strictly speaking, but it keeps things organized and clear from a visual perspective.)

Brute force

Let’s say you’re a masochist with a fetish for tedium and frustration. This is the method for you.

Remember, I said “masochist” and not “primitive cave dweller” here, so I’m going to run on the assumption that, being an enlightened user of spreadsheeting tools, you understand how to sort columns.

So we start by sorting the “Base Currency” column to make things at least somewhat easier to deal with… Note how all the base currencies are now grouped.

Now for the brute force part. We search Google for each conversion pair (“CAD USD,” “EUR USD,” etc.), copy and paste the ratio into our spreadsheet, and manually fill down.

For this small sample set, it took me almost exactly a minute to build a conversion column using brute force. But this is only for a small handful of currency pairs. If I was dealing with dozens of pairs, this would have been a much bigger task.

Enter The Joys of GOOGLEFINANCE()

Like I may have mentioned earlier, one of the nice parts about Google Sheets is that it gives users direct access to some of Google’s services directly through a series of bespoke functions.

For example, the GOOGLETRANSLATE() function lets users translate strings in spreadsheets from one language to another using the Google Translate engine. In conjunction with DETECTLANGUAGE(), one can generate some interesting formulas.

But here we’re going to talk about the joys of the GOOGLEFINANCE() function.

So, if I wanted to find the closing price of Apple on March 7, 2014, I’d write the formula like this,

=GOOGLEFINANCE("AAPL","price","3/7/2014")

And Google automatically returns that information and builds a table to display it.

It turns out that the GOOGLEFINANCE() function also lets you find the current conversion rate between two currencies. (Unfortunately, at time of writing, it doesn’t let you find historical conversion rates.)

Here’s that syntax:

=GOOGLEFINANCE("CURRENCY:[BASECURRENCY][TARGETCURRENCY]")

Using the official, three-character currency codes, we’d convert Canadian Dollars to USD using this function:

=GOOGLEFINANCE("CURRENCY:CADUSD")

Now, for our table of VC deals we want to convert into USD, we could hard-code the currencies we want to convert into our formulas by group.

Alright, so we start with the general form of a currency conversion rate query in Google Sheets, the same as what was previously listed.

=GOOGLEFINANCE("CURRENCY:[BASECURRENCY][TARGETCURRENCY]")

Now, let’s look at our table and its columns.

Column C: “Base Currency”

Column D: “Target Currency”

Hmmm… seems familiar… If only there was a way to join those elements into a formula.

Enter Google Sheets’s CONCATENATE() function, which is similar to its cousin CONCAT(), except for the important fact that it lets you concatenate an arbitrary number of elements.

Importantly, in Google Sheets, the output of the CONCATENATE() function is not simply treated as a string. Its output is usable inside another function.

So, to start, let’s concatenate cells D2 and E2 using the following formula:

=CONCATENATE(D2,E2)

And as we can see, the result is “CADUSD” which is is the required pairing of source and target currencies we need in our formula.

Now that we’ve proven we can build our one part of our formula using CONCATENATE(), let’s see if we can build the rest of it.

Typing in the following formula produces outputs what we need to give to GOOGLEFINANCE()…

=CONCATENATE("CURRENCY:",D2,E2)

So, now we can bring it all together…

=GOOGLEFINANCE(CONCATENATE("CURRENCY:",D2,E2)

Before showing the nice gif of how it all “just works,” give me one second to explain how one formula will be able to generate a conversion ratio for all of the currencies in our set.

The D2 and E2 cell references are relative, which means that as I drag the equation down the sheet it will still pull from the cells in the two adjacent columns, but will take the value from each row. So that same equation, if applied to, say, row 3, would read from D3 and E3. From row 4, it would pull from D4 and E4, and so on down the sheet.

So, here’s the moment you’ve been waiting for…

At this point, it’s just a matter of multiplying the “Deal Amount” column by the “Conversion Ratio” column to generate the “Converted Amount.”

And there you have it…

Next Steps

One of the features of this kind of query with GOOGLEFINANCE() is that it dynamically updates as new currency exchange rate data becomes available. This can be viewed as either a bug or a feature, depending on your particular needs.

In the event you don’t want these numbers to change, simply copy the contents of the columns that update dynamically and paste those cells in “as values”. (In Google Sheets, goto Edit -> Paste Special -> Paste Values Only [⌘ + Shift + V].) As this suggests, it just pastes in the alphanumeric values of the cells, and strips out the formula data.

In the event that you still want to edit the formulas, which in variably you will, my suggestion is to duplicate the tab so you have one dynamic, editable version, and the static version you can work off of in later analysis.

That’s All, Folks!

This has been a somewhat protracted way of saying that a little bit of abstraction makes for a time-saving and viscerally satisfying (at least from my perspective) data analysis experience.

CONCATENATE() can be used outside or inside other functions in Google Sheets to build flexible, extensible auto-generating formulas in your spreadsheets, and I’m very much looking forward to a exploring how else it can be applied in the work that I do.

This is also my first time offering up one of these tutorials, so if you liked it and want me to make more of these, please let me know! Future topics I want to cover include pivot tables, demonstrating a superior alternative to VLOOKUP() and INDEX(MATCH()), and a couple of others.

One year ago, almost to the date, I finally managed to graduate from UChicago with general honors.

I did “the scenic route” through college, taking a long break after three years to work on a startup, only to come back and finish on relatively short notice.

It was worth it to go back and finish, and I’m happy I took the time off in the middle. Even though taking that time off involved a lot of struggling, and ultimately resulted in failure of the project, I maintain it was the best thing for me to do at the time. I’d do like 95% of it all over again.

In general, the last year has been good. I’ve built a platform for myself through my weekly(-ish) newsletter, and gained credibility by writing for Mattermark and now Crunchbase.

The most rewarding thing, though, has been my continued work with the Python Software Foundation. It’s an incredible organization consisting of phenomenally smart and kind people, and I have the privilege of working with some great people, including one of my oldest friends, in making Startup Row happen.

I’ve also found the thing I want to do with the next couple decades of my life, which is to find and invest in interesting startups. And anything I can do to accelerate myself toward that end will be pursued.

In general, it’s been a pretty good 365-ish days.

I’ve learned a lot in the past year, and I’m still figuring out how I want to articulate it. Stay tuned for more.

Also, as petty as it sounds, it still feels good to stick it to my high school guidance counsellor who thought applying to so-called tier-three schools was “a bit of a reach” for me.

One night this week I met up with one of my best friends. I don’t get to see him that often, but that’s alright. It’s one of those friendships that picks up right where it left off, even if it’s been weeks or months.

He’s had a lot of opportunities, and so have I. This friend of mine is a bit older than me, and, accordingly, has moved farther on in his career. He’s one of these people with a solid job and, like, three side projects, all of which are doing phenomenally well. If he wasn’t so down to earth, it’d be all too easy to resent the guy’s success.

Somehow, we got to talking about opportunities in the meta sense, and I realized his definition of opportunity and my definition of opportunity are quite different. And, now that I’ve had a cumulative fourteen hours on airplanes without internet this week to reconcile these two differing definitions, I think I’ve been won over by his.Continue reading “Opportunity in Two Flavors”

Snap Inc., maker of the Snapchat app and face-mounted camera glasses called Spectacles, filed its S-1 with the SEC this past week, the first major step toward going public.

I thought it’d be interesting to compare Snap Inc. to Facebook, considering that Snap CEO Evan Spiegel’s IPO roadshow message is that his company is “The next Facebook,” according to coverage in the Wall Street Journal.

I spent some time digging through Snap’s S-1 filing and found some interesting tidbits:

Snap aims to raise $3 billion in its IPO at a $25 billion valuation, up just slightly from the $20 billion valuation it reached in its $1.8 billion “extended” Series F round closed in May 2016 (and reported on here in the 4th edition of this newsletter)

Snapchat currently boasts 158 million daily active users. (For reference: the company reported 110 million DAUs in December 2015.)

Facebook had 483 million daily active users during the month of December 2011. (Roughly 3x Snapchat.)

In that same month, Facebook users uploaded 250 million photos daily to FB. There were an average of 2.7 billion likes and comments made during the 3-month period ending December 31, 2011. (Roughly 1/10th of the photos uploaded but a comparable number of aggregate interactions to Snapchat at time of IPO filing.)

Facebook users spent an aggregate of 9.7 billion minutes per day on the desktop site, which works out to about 12-13 minutes per day for each of FB’s then 845 million monthly active users. This also does not count time spent on the mobile app. (To compare: FB users spent slightly less time than Snapchat users on a per-day basis.)

Oh, and Facebook was also profitable and had comparatively more valuable assets and cash on hand at time of its IPO filing.

One of the metrics I find most interesting is to compare the per-user value of Snapchat compared to other platforms and services. I arrive at these figures by dividing the number of Daily Active Users by the then-current (or desired) valuation of the platform. (I’d prefer to use MAUs, but, tellingly, Snap Inc didn’t disclose MAU statistics in its S-1 filing.)

Instagram: $1 billion acquisition by Facebook in April 2012 / 1.38 million DAU in April 2012 (That’s via data from ComScore, but data from AppData suggested that Instagram had only 860,000 DAU at acquisition) = $724.63 per user at 1.38M DAU

It’s interesting to look at these figures, because it might hint at how Snap values and intends to position itself going forward. Whatever signal can be divined from Snap’s per-user-value figures points toward the company’s intention to aggregate attention and data in the same way as Facebook and Twitter did, rather than provide a simple service like Line and WhatsApp. In other words, the per-user value Snap Inc aims to show its investors is in the same ballpark as other massive social platforms of previous generations.

As a platform, Snapchat is compelling for a number of reasons, including its unique augmented reality components, an innovative user experience design paradigm and, importantly, a strangle hold on users’ attention by way of its ephemeral messaging and video play-back features. Whether Snap Inc is able to capitalize on its strengths and deliver on its potential value as a platform is still uncertain.

However, I remain skeptical that Snap Inc will be the next Facebook. I doubt Snap will attain Facebook’s scale or scope, and I’m not the first to point out that Snap’s current price feels a bit expensive.

If you’re involved in the tech industry and like to listen to podcasts, chances are you’ve already heard the standard-issue stuff that consistently ranks at the top of iTunes. Shows like Exponent (of which I am particularly fond), the a16z Podcast, Startup from Gimlet Media, and even NPR offerings like How I Built This and the TED Radio Hour are probably old hat.

Starting a couple of months ago, I set out to find podcasts about topics I want to learn more about. The broader goal beyond finding some entertaining content is two-fold: As an auditory learner, listening to experts talk about a subject is the easiest way for me to pick up the jargon of a field, which feels like half the battle. And hearing from domain experts on podcasts is the most effective way to wrap one’s head around both the “state of the art” and the general consensus about where a particular field is going.Continue reading “Great Tech Podcasts From Off The Beaten Path”

Since (finally) graduating from college in March and spending much of April on a couch recuperating, I spent the latter three quarters of 2016 doing a lot of writing, both for money (from Mattermark and other clients) and for pleasure (i.e. in my personal blog, in The Missive and my newsletter).

A look back at 2016

Here’s a rundown of some of the statistics:

73 articles and posts in 7 different publications (including my two blogs)

31 editions of my weekly(ish) newsletter, which I launched in May.

113,704 words published publicly… which doesn’t include the embarrassing number of half-done drafts I’ve got stowed away or the words cut by my long-suffering editors.

In the wee hours of Wednesday morning, we learned who our new president is going to be. I did not vote for him, and like many I am very concerned by the prospect of his presidency.

Yesterday, I spent most of the day on the couch or in bed, sleeping off the previous night, which consisted of several glasses of wine at a friend’s “election night party” and a very late-night binge of bad news and hot takes.

I went to bed at 4:30 AM on Wednesday. I am not proud of this.

Today, Thursday, I am now well-rested and recovered from the initial shock of the event, and it has been weird. Here’s what’s on my mind.

There is this phrase in French, “L’appel du vide.” It translates to “the call of the void.”

An example: Have you ever taken a walk along a cliff, overlooking the majestic view such a high vantage point gives you, peered over the lip and hear a little voice suggest, “Jump!” You’ll shudder and feel ill-at-ease. You wonder whether this constitutes “suicidal thoughts or actions” and whether you should tell your doctor about it the next time you see them.

The call of the void is a somewhat antique phrase for what psychologists today call “intrusive thoughts.” Think of them as brief lapses of conscious control, a moment when the chain of thought jumps the derailleur.

The key fact about intrusive thoughts is that, like swamp gas, they bubble to the surface, make their odious presence known, and then drift away. You cope with them by letting them pass. By virtue of their sudden appearance and shocking quality, the little voice is easily ignorable.

His election was not an answer to the call of the void. It was not as if almost 60 million Americans took a stroll along the proverbial cliff and heard a little voice suggest, “Trump!”

Instead of answering to a sudden impulse, it’s clear that much of his following was drawn ineluctably into the his campaign and ultimate election, as if by a siren’s song, weeks and months ago. Wave upon wave of red flags were ignored like bumpy reefs on a course of dead reckoning headlong toward shore. Instead of the warm embrace of the siren, though, supporters are attracted by a simplistic image of safety, to a time before, in their eyes, America fell from greatness.

I feel as though there is nothing more I can add to the discourse in these respects. No amount of personal anecdote is going to change the course of history, much less rise above the din.

It seems as though stories about LGBT friends who are now uncertain about their rights, family members with “pre-existing conditions” that might inhibit their access to healthcare in a post-ACA era, people on the south side of Chicago fearing expanded police power, or sisters and female cousins who may lose control over what they do with their bodies will fall on deaf ears.

Khizr Khan and Alicia Machado’s stories didn’t move the needle.

Nor will more recursive analysis of the deep grievances that fueled the president-elect’s rise to power. The generalities about what motivate different segments of our population — white working class, black women, soccer moms, Latinos, etc. — now feel like tired and insufficient stereotypes from a recently bygone era.

No one story will affect anything, really. And, the darker and more cynical side of me is painfully aware that the people in my orbit who can be most negatively affected by a new regime fit snugly into the very stereotypes I am so desperate to avoid contributing to.

So again, I feel as though there’s nothing constructive I can contribute to the discussion of why things played out the way they did, or who might be affected.

What I can contribute to is the discussion of how to go on from here.

Hold their feet to the fire. Even for people like me who treat politics like sports, it can be exhausting to keep up with everything. But now more than ever it’s important to remain informed about what’s going on, so your voice can be heard. Here are some of the basics.

Holding your elected officials accountable means consuming a diverse media diet and breaking out of your personal filter bubble. Actively seek out a range of sources about the issues you care about, and be sure to include those voices that don’t agree with yours lest you become as partisan and narrowly-informed as the people you disagree with.

Vote in every election. I didn’t vote in 2008 or 2012, the first general elections I was eligible for. I am one of those people who believe that your vote doesn’t matter, and in the presidential race that’s pretty much true unless you live in a swing state. But down-ballot races matter, and in those smaller races your vote has more leverage.

And remember The President ≠ The Government. In America, we live at the intersection of federal, state and local governments, as well as special-purpose governments like school boards, water reclamation districts, and the like.

There is no monolithic entity controlling it all, so chances are you can actually pinpoint the few people in that one government office that support that policy you disagree with. They have email addresses, fax numbers and physical mailboxes that have to be checked. The attention paid to your complaint is proportional to the amount of effort you put into it: physical letters are worth a thousand angry tweets.

There are over 500,000 elected officials in the USA, almost one in 400 people. The president is just one person. If you don’t like what they’re doing, then vote them out. But it’s incumbent on you to actually make your voice heard.

Don’t make rash conclusions. Although I haven’t taken a course in journalism, I find myself writing a lot of things for public consumption, and I hold many journalistic best practices dear.

To echo the sentiments of Brooke Gladstone, the host of WYNC’s “On The Media” and a contributor to The Washington Post, when reporting it is extremely important to focus only on what is actually happening, rather than what might or could happen. It’s my belief that that advice is applicable to leading life day-to-day.

The fact of the matter is that, right now, we don’t know what a Trump presidency will look like. I have my serious doubts about his ability to be a good president, but for now I’m not willing to entertain the idea that he’s the second coming of Hitler.

It might be my college-educated, upper-middle class, straight, white, able-bodied, unmarried, childless cis-male privilege talking, but I feel such comparisons are needlessly hyperbolic and that fleeing the country now smacks of a degree of cowardice I don’t feel comfortable calling out in person.

At least for now, the images of sprawling internment camps for “Illegals,” Pence-mandated conversion therapy for gay kids, and other horrors are just as farcical as the “FEMA camps” Alex Jones and his ilk have been blathering about for years now.

The right has been terrified that Obama would send in “jackbooted thugs” to take away our constitutional rights, and nothing happened. Now that the tables have turned, it’s no surprise that the left is entertaining its own dark fantasies about what could be. But until sales of jackboot polish start to rise, it seems like there is much ado about nothing.

Giving into those fears by leaving or giving up is to answer the call of the void.

Finally, as hard as it may be, it’s vitally important to give the other side the benefit of the doubt. I spoke with my mom today and she said something that stuck with me: “Now I feel like how the Republicans must have felt for the past eight years. [By January,] I won’t have a president that reflects my vision for the country.”

This election taught me that there is a huge empathy gap between the right and the left. I really don’t know what makes some Republicans tick, and I’m sure there are things I believe that are unconscionable to those on the other side of the aisle.

As someone who works in the tech sector, which has only exploded in cultural relevance and economic prosperity over the past quarter century, it’s all too easy for me to ignore the plight of those who work in fields that are on the decline.

For example: I catch myself more and more saying that humans will be “abstracted away” from certain types of work, like in some cold algebraic trick, by machines. I maintain that that is still a net positive to society, but it’s a very acute loss to a certain part of the population, and something needs to be done to ameliorate the economic pain they will suffer before it gets worse.

But it goes beyond token concern for those who are facing hard times now or in the future. Learning more about how “the other side” thinks, what they worry about, what motivates them, and what they want from government will help prevent the kind of blind divisiveness that seems to pervade public discourse. And it might help to cure the statistical myopia that caused this election to be such a shock.

Iam trying very hard to follow Obama’s suggestion to give the incoming president a chance, to be “open minded.” I’m doing my best to stay positive, and for all of our sakes I am sincerely hoping to be surprised by President Trump. (It still feels weird to say it.)

Nietzsche has this saying, “if you stare into the abyss, the abyss stares back into you.” The prospect of President Trump may seem scary to a lot of people, myself included, but there’s nothing I can do to change the situation today. There’s another election in two years, and another presidential election two years after that.

Just how much damage can he do in four years?

On second thought… it’s best not to answer that. That’s the void calling.

Update: Well, my post has been up for 4 hours and then this happens. It’s going to be a long four years…

This past week, Apple announced a number of things at a special event in San Francisco. Among them was the latest iPhone model which, controversially, did away with the 3.5 mm headphone jack. Company claims that this omission was “courageous” were met with sneers and jeers from the peanut gallery and media cognoscenti alike.Continue reading “Of Apple & Courage”